Raw studio film footage, usually produced in high resolution at production studios, often needs to be converted or transcoded into multiple formats so that the footage may be distributed by retail businesses that deliver video to an array of devices that their customers use (e.g., televisions, personal computers, tablets, cell phones, etc.). The film footage is generally part of a package called a “work order,” which may also include information about the desired output formats and a deadline by which the work order must be completed (e.g., a scheduled release date). Work order scheduling is a complex process because a work order may contain many disparate tasks that different resources are required to handle and because new work orders can arrive at any time and need to be inserted into task flows that are already underway. By way of example, some traditional work schedulers schedule work orders by establishing start times for all work order tasks, but do not allow tasks to start before the scheduled time a required resource becomes available for the task. Also, where tasks have been scheduled in such a way that several work orders will go past their deadlines, some traditional work schedulers would use the size of a missed deadline as the measure of the work order's importance.
Based on the foregoing, there is a need for an approach providing a work order scheduler that schedules work order tasks based on an optimization of available resources and an assessment of cost penalty functions for missing work order deadlines.